While most fell in love with Rihanna’s British Vogue cover, social media editor for Marie Claire Krystyna Chavez was not impressed. Chavez, who is Mexican-American, feels that the Bajan beauty appropriated the chola (female gang member) look from the Mexican culture with her penciled in eyebrows.
In an op-ed for Marie Claire, Chavez said even though the look has a stigma in her community, the stigma is transformed into something acceptable and beautiful when Rihanna did it.
“To most Mexican and Mexican-American women, drawn-on eyebrows are a look historically representative of a marginalized culture—my culture—and have become a Latinx street style viewed as “trashy” by the rest of society. That is, until Rihanna wears them.”
Chavez discussed how growing up in East Los Angeles, she stayed away from the look so she would not be mistaken for a chola. She also voiced understanding that the thin eyebrows also have roots in South African culture and the Roaring Twenties, but the cover still left her “Mexican-American heart was deeply confused, and deeply annoyed.”
“So when I saw Rihanna on the cover of British Vogue this week with a set of ultra-skinny brows, my immediate reaction was, “Wait, WTF?” Why is Rihanna wearing chola brows?,” she wrote.
As a black women who has had too many celebrities appropriate my culture, I feel your pain.
Latinxs, how do you all feel about this cover?
